Am I the only progressive who will be voting for Ford? I like his populist leaning and I'm tired of voting for liberals who've almost always failed us. I was cheering for Joe, but Ford seems more fiscally responsible. I'm willing to give him a shot.
He isn't fiscally responsible. His transit "plan" is a plan for losing millions of dollars. Joe is the one who is fiscally responsible because he is the only candidate who is not lying by saying that you can cut or freeze taxes and increase city services. Joe's transit plan already exists, is budgetted and paid for.
What is fiscally responsible about changing a plan that is already financed and underway with a new subway plan that costs 3 to 5 times more per kilometer of track than LRT?
Honestly, if my only choice was Ford or Smitherman, I would be tempted to vote Ford, but fortunately it isn't my only choice. I can vote for Joe Pantalone and send the message to city council that Transit City is what voters want.
Toronto can't afford Ford: http://www.torontocannotafford.com/
I'm willing to give him a shot.
And that shot will land firmly in your foot.
As the multi-millionaire son of a conservative politician dad, Rob Ford is about as populist as George W. Bush.
He says he loves Toronto, but one really has to ask why it is that 2 out of 3 label factories he owns are in jurisdictions south of the border. New Jersey is one. I can't remember where the other one is.
This thread is kinda funny.
okay i have defended Ford , but anyone who will vote for that man and claims to be a progressive is either a liar or just plain..
hey, I've seen trots do "critical support" for worse...
I don't see any evidence of the thread starter being progressive from the two previous post from that source.
As the thread creator should know, Rob Ford hasn't changed his cost cutting tune since he was first elected. An example of how Ford would keep costs in line comes from an exchange reported in the Jan. 31, 2001 edition of the Toronto Star:
"Let's get our brains around this whole concept, guys: We have to start today cutting back, not looking for expenditures," said Rob Ford.
Councillor Anne Johnston took umbrage and asked whether Ford was prepared to sell off "our parks and theatres."
"Absolutely . . . I agree. Etobicoke people don't want tax increases. They want services but they don't want (us) squandering hard-earned tax dollars."
Maybe the inverse question is: would a Mayor Ford have *any* "progressives" in his cabinet? After all, Lastman did, and Miller had conservatives--would anybody even be willing to *serve* Ford?
thread drift? Can someone tell this Saint Johner, and ex-pat Torontonian when the date of the TO election? In case you are interested, we have a provincial election next Monday/end thread drift.
A few days ago I thought I might vote for Ford, out of pure vindictiveness. I remembered that when Mike Harris got elected back in 1995, he screwed many of his most virulent supporters right off the bat.
I figured, despaired actually, at what it might take to make voters realize what a menace Ford and others of his political ilk are.
Then I thought-Yeah! I should vote for him. Knowing full well that some of his most ardent supporters, among them people who can least afford it, would be among the first to get screwed.
Last night I watched the so called debate...watched decent Joe Pantalone in action and whew! Thankfully the vindictiveness passed.
I am a Pantalone man right to the end!!
A few days ago I thought I might vote for Ford, out of pure vindictiveness. I remembered that when Mike Harris got elected back in 1995, he screwed many of his most virulent supporters right off the bat.
To be fair, Harris never really screwed anyone over. He was pretty honest about what he wanted to do.
Maybe the inverse question is: would a Mayor Ford have *any* "progressives" in his cabinet? After all, Lastman did, and Miller had conservatives--would anybody even be willing to *serve* Ford?
Oh I think so. Most of the councillors are now starting to embrace ford. So as not to lose when he wins I guess. Seat on those committees pay well
Stockholm, I thought you said you supported Ford in an attempt to stop a right wing city hall?
To be fair, Harris never really screwed anyone over. He was pretty honest about what he wanted to do.
Frankly, I think that's a myth. For example, Harris never campaigned on amalgamating municipalities, schools boards and hospitals. He just did because he had the power to do it. Likewise with a lot of "red tape cutting". Sounds good until people realized that it meant water inspection systems fail and people die. He did deliver on some of his promises to starve the poor, de-fang the labour movement and cut taxes for the rich but he also delivered on lots of other un-promised goodies for his corporate cronies. And he (and Ernie) left the province in a deficit. Don't remember him promising that.
Exactly. He promised to cut red tape, introduce efficiencies, stand up to Unions and reduce welfare. That people don't make the connection between these things and their own day to day experience is what left-wing political activists ought to be working to overcome.
Some people simply will never figure out that the reason the street car is in their way is because it is stuck behind a car that is in front of it. All they see is the street car.
To be fair, Harris never really screwed anyone over. He was pretty honest about what he wanted to do.
Well, he promised not to close hospitals. And then closed a stack of them.
Sorry for the thread drift. But maybe it shows that Ford's promises will be just as hollow.
I like what Ford has to say about improving customer service and um...that's about it. I have trouble seeing what's progressive there.
Like cue said, all some people see is the streetcar.
It's official, I lost my mind.. I can't believe I was seriously considering voting for Ford.
I like what Ford has to say about improving customer service and um...that's about it. I have trouble seeing what's progressive there.
Even that, I dunno.. Municipal services and customer service don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. For example, is the priority of a bus operatory consistency, safety, and quality service or is it retail-like customer service? I've heard of drivers trying to enforce safety regulations or take a break after 6 hours straight on the job get undermined and chewed out in front of the public by their supervisors for having "poor customer service"..
Don't get me wrong, I'm a former municipal employee (public library) and I highly valued excellence in service to the public. But it's not a case of running it like a business or "the customer is always right". That attitude is not necessarily compatible with things like transit, permits, waste removal,etc..
Yes, he'll make sure someone responds to your email within two days!!1!1!!!111!
[url=http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontomayoralrace/article/853234]Yours vaguely, Rob Ford[/url]
Now *that's* what the people of this city need!
Another fun quote:
"I'm going to try and remain calm, but it just makes me sick when you left-wing nut jobs like Howard Moscoe are down here trying to bash the police non-stop, I feel embarrassed for [Chief Julian Fantino] to come here. If he wants to go after overtime, why doesn't he go after his own people's overtime and all their wasted money. Why don't you go after everyone, Mr. Moscoe? No, you don't because you're a police basher, your whole left-wing contingent down here, you're just a bunch of left-wing socialists that just attack and attack the police. You criticize and tell them they're racist, you tell them everything. Well, I've got news for you -- You should travel around the world and see how fortunate we are to have a strong police force .... It just burns me up you can sit here and.... People are young. They're aggressive men and women of the police force, they want to get ahead in life. Maybe you don't, but when I was young, I wanted to go out and work 50, 60 hours and support my family. Not attack people for working overtime. That's embarrassing. That's a sickness to have someone like you making these motions, I will not support it." - 28 February 2003, National Post.
[url=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/marcus-gee/can-we-t... we trust Rob Ford, a guy who gets his numbers wrong?[/url]These are not just sloppy mistakes or slips of the tongue. Mr. Ford makes these untrue statements over and over at debates and campaign appearances. His rivals for mayor have corrected him repeatedly in public, but he keeps on trotting them out as fact. Much of what he says falls into the category of “truthiness,” defined by television comedian Stephen Colbert as what you want the truth to be, not what it actually is.
The rise of Rob Ford to the leading spot in the opinion polls is, sadly, no joke. The Etobicoke councillor is just weeks away from becoming mayor of Canada’s biggest city. When a man who says he would run the city like a business repeatedly gets his figures wrong, you have to wonder about his fitness for the job. When he brazenly repeats his errors, you have to wonder about his judgment.
If we say we trust public figures, we usually mean that we believe what they say is true. By that measure, Mr. Ford is the most untrustworthy candidate for mayor.
"It's not a lie if you believe it" -- George Costanza
......
Caissa, the municipal election in Toronto is on Monday October 25.
What was a gloomy thread has turned into a "Truth About Ford Thread". I love it.
Thanks, Maysie. Do you have foure year terms like we do in NB now or are they three year terms?
Here's a Youtube link for those progressives who still find themselves tempted to vote for Ford for some mystifying reason: [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YZQ4oQjxgc&feature=player_embedded]Rob Ford's Compassion for the Homeless[/url]
Because I know a lot of folks don't do Youtube, I've taken the time to write up what he said, in council, verbatim:
Rob Ford: This is a bylaw holding the door to making every ward have a shelter. That's the black and white of the issue here. Okay? I'm sorry to say. This is an insult to my constituents to even think about having a war ... a a a homeless shelter in their ward. And you want, you want me to have a public meeting to discuss this?! Why don't we have a public lynching!?
Edited to add: Cueball, the third location is Chicago. Caissa, elections happen every four years - http://www.toronto.ca/civic-engagement/learning-material/elections.htm
Thanks for the information and link, writer.
Exactly. He promised to cut red tape, introduce efficiencies, stand up to Unions and reduce welfare. That people don't make the connection between these things and their own day to day experience is what left-wing political activists ought to be working to overcome.
If you're here to echo the GREAT BIG LIE that Mike Harris kept more promises than he broke, you're in the wrong place completely.
the reason the street car is in their way is because it is stuck behind a car
Some people are unable to see beyond their next left turn. Go Joe GO.
Stockholm, I thought you said you supported Ford in an attempt to stop a right wing city hall?
I don't know where you got that idea. I support Pantalone to stop a rightwing city hall.
I don't know if this article from eye weekly has been published already.
Since eye weekly is owned by the Toronto Star, and my guess is Liberals have no idea who to vote for, I'm sure editorially they're confused. The article isn't great, and it makes you imagine the reality when Ford is mayor, which makes me want to plaster the city with Joe stickers.
WHEN ROB FORD IS MAYORSo, deep breath. What will Mayor Rob Ford's Toronto look like? It's safe to say the entire plant-watering staff at City Hall will be laid off. And city councillors will be brown-bagging lunches to meetings rather than having them catered. One expects that council would accept the fact that he has a mandate to cut on those two fronts, at least (achieving savings well into the five figures on a $7-billion budget!).
Aside from that, we know what Rob Ford says his Toronto would look like: the mayor would personally return every phone call; streetcars would be decommissioned and subways would be built in the suburbs; council would lose half its members and each councillor lose half his or her office budget; arts and culture spending would be slashed or outright eliminated; more police would be hired and a law-and-order chief would be given carte blanche to be tough on suspects and neighbourhoods; taxes would be cut, the union would be busted or humbled and garbage service would be contracted out.
One could spend a lot of time analyzing the implications of all this. For starters: fewer councillors with fewer resources could not provide the "excellent customer service" Ford promises; eliminating streetcars would increase gridlock rather than alleviating it while suburban subways would doom the TTC to ever larger operating deficits; and tax cuts coupled with an increase in the police budget would destroy the city's finances.
But here's the most disturbing truth of all: it's not worth going into detail about the city Rob Ford promises because it's pure fantasy. Mayor Rob Ford has absolutely no chance of enacting his agenda and will, as a result, grind the city to a halt, undoing seven or more years of progress and creating a situation much like the one he claims he's addressing now.
Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone unveiled his environmental platform on Car-Free Day and took a hard shot at Ford.
"… People will realize that Rob Ford's Toronto is the Detroit of today or if you don’t want to go that badly, the Buffalo of today or the Cleveland of today," he said Wednesday.
"It's really not the Toronto that Torontonians want, which is the Paris of tomorrow."
Pantalone, who placed third in the Nanos poll, said Ford's vision of Toronto is a "nightmare" for those who see the city as inclusive and where no one is left behind.
"Is he going to cut all the festivals? … He has to slash and burn to achieve his objectives," Pantalone said, noting Ford has promised to balance the books by cutting both revenues and expenses.
"He (Ford) is the hidden bomb that will destroy us."
Pantalone picked three hard-hit cities for a point of comparison as to how Toronto might evolve under a Ford mayorship.
Detroit in particular has been devastated by the turmoil in the U.S. the auto industry, but all three cities have suffered greatly from long-term de-industrialization in the U.S.'s northeast and the more recent effects of the 2008-09 recession.
All three rank among the poorest large cities in the United States. They suffer from abandoned factories and boarded-up homes as jobs and people have left.
Toronto's real estate has continued to rise in value and its population to increase despite the downturn, in part because it attracts a disproportionate number of Canada's immigrants. Its economy has already largely shifted to knowledge-sector businesses such as financial services, health care and education and away from manufacturing.
[url=http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100922/torontovotes-let...
Rob Ford is a big tax cut and privatization guy, just Like Mike Harris.
Recall that Mike Harris and Jim Flaherty promised balanced budgets, then buried massive deficits behind the sell off of Ontario infrastructure and assets at pennies on the dollar to Conservative contributors and cronies.
'Common Sense'?
Common thieves.
The Star eluded to some poll today that shows Ford's support starting to slip. Let's hope....
Rob Ford, like Mike Harris, is a big fat liar.
These are not just sloppy mistakes or slips of the tongue. Mr. Ford makes these untrue statements over and over at debates and campaign appearances. His rivals for mayor have corrected him repeatedly in public, but he keeps on trotting them out as fact. Much of what he says falls into the category of "truthiness," defined by television comedian Stephen Colbert as what you want the truth to be, not what it actually is.The rise of Rob Ford to the leading spot in the opinion polls is, sadly, no joke. The Etobicoke councillor is just weeks away from becoming mayor of Canada's biggest city. When a man who says he would run the city like a business repeatedly gets his figures wrong, you have to wonder about his fitness for the job. When he brazenly repeats his errors, you have to wonder about his judgment.
If we say we trust public figures, we usually mean that we believe what they say is true. By that measure, Mr. Ford is the most untrustworthy candidate for mayor.
Ooops. Just saw that writer quoted this article earlier.
Tax cuts and privatization always cost us more in the end.
Only an idiot like Rob Ford believes otherwise.
While more in the realm of contracting out than tax cuts, the E-Health "scandal' was all about the government's addiction to consultants. The money was wasted and accountability diminished precisely because the work was not done in-house by government IT workers. Ford, and others like him, want to have it both ways. They point to Smitherman's record with E-health and then propose contracting out garbage collection, cleaning and who knows what else. It's a corporate give-away, not fiscal prudence. I'd like to hear Joe P would expose the hypocrisy of those who want to contract out everything that moves.
And someone also ought to remind Ford that the garbage workers in Etobicoke, while private, are also unionized. So his promise that there will NEVER EVER EVER again be a garbage strike is patent bullshit. As long as the work is unionized, there's the risk of a strike.
More wisdom from the compassionate candidate:
"When you have a mayor that is leading the city that says people don't have the right to say who lives in their backyard, ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem, Government housing is killing this city, slowly but surely. We do not need any more government housing. We should give them rent subsidies, but to build more and more and more and encourage more and more people that do not have a job, they are slowly killing the city," - 5 May 2005, National Post
Is it just me, or is this piece kind of hilarious?
[url=http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/09/24/peter-kuitenbrouwer-flaherty-plu... plugs Ford at Sherbourne Common[/url]
It is. Try reading between the lines with your eyes crossed and see if it makes more sense.
Maybe we should have a thread for "progressives for Harper" and "progressives for the Tea Party."
Progressives For Silly Walks.
"Progressives For Hitler" actually sounds like a great 80s band name.
I don't know if this article from eye weekly has been published already.
Since eye weekly is owned by the Toronto Star, and my guess is Liberals have no idea who to vote for, I'm sure editorially they're confused. The article isn't great, and it makes you imagine the reality when Ford is mayor, which makes me want to plaster the city with Joe stickers.
WHEN ROB FORD IS MAYORSo, deep breath. What will Mayor Rob Ford's Toronto look like? It's safe to say the entire plant-watering staff at City Hall will be laid off. And city councillors will be brown-bagging lunches to meetings rather than having them catered. One expects that council would accept the fact that he has a mandate to cut on those two fronts, at least (achieving savings well into the five figures on a $7-billion budget!).
*snip*
These days, if you work for the provincial government within either the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Training, Colleges & Universities in the Mowat Block the reality is this:
- if you want plants, bring in your own and water them yourself
- if you want the garbage and recycling bins at your desk emptied, do it yourself and take them out to the containers in the hallway
- if you want your desk dusted or cleaned, do it yourself
- if you want your work space vacuumed, put in a request or bring in your own vacuum
- if you want water, coffee, snacks or lunch at a meeting, bring your own.
- if the refrigerator, kettle, microwave, toaster oven, dishsoap or paper towels in the lunch room need replacing and you haven't already passed the hat amongst your co-workers to build a contingency fund, it sucks to be you and you're out of luck because these "perks" are no longer provided.
All of the above is a dirty little secret within the Ontario government and McGuinty did not reverse any of these Harris cost-cutting measures. Take a deep breath, indeed.
listening to hate radio (aka talk cfrb/am640 etc) it's horrid to think of supporting Rob Ford ...but the almost frantic quality of the rightwing fear that Ford gonna lose it maybe points to why the left has such a problem mobilizing electoral support when faced with a proven buffoon like Rob Ford (reagan, geebush, palin harper etc).... Simone Weil, the great Brit philosopher who starved herself to death in WW2 in empathy with hitler's victims said it best. In reality and in fiction, good and evil come across with such a difference that the handicap for the good guy is obvious. In fiction, good is boring, hohum and blahblah a waste of time, while fictional evil is exciting and fun, dramatic. But in reality, good is thrilling, fun and wonderful dramatic, while true EVIL is boring stupid and ugly! So trying to sell 'good' must be done with this realization in mind- but the rightwing, operating with a natural built in advantage, thinks it's better on the merits, and the goofs believe that!
How on earth can anyone convince them otherwise? That they do not really want Rob Ford in the mayor's office?
Maybe this has been covered here or in another thread--I couldn't see it with some quick searching--but will this be any different from O'Brien getting elected as mayor of Ottawa? He found himself faced with an entire room of hostile Councillors who torpedoed almost anything he tried to do. Are Toronto municipal politics any different?
That said, I find Ford to be a pretty ridiculous and scary figure, as do most of you--but here's hoping he will become as much of a powerless joke around City Hall as O'Brien is/has been.
I suppose the case for Ford over Smitherman is akin to a case for Yeltsin over Putin...
